This is a giant thing, a landscape in itself really, so once it appears you must destroy that too and head on to the next landscape where the pattern repeats with smart variation. In Solar Ash, you travel across a range of different platforming landscapes, and in each one you must destroy a series of targets in order to summon the landscape's resident beast. Fights that feel like a part of traversal rather than an interruption.īeaks and bones! But despite the wild setting, there is order here too. Brisk fights, each one, dealt with in a few sharp seconds as you pass by, ideally, without stopping. You fight alien blob creatures with glowing eyes and beaks and mantles of bone. Schwarzschild! Mobius! We are in their world now, suspended. There is a lost world that might yet be saved, and so you skate and skate while space and time do strange black-hole things. The whole thing is set inside a black hole, according to the fragmentary narrative, an old mosaic of a story that will reconstruct itself tile by tile if you have the energy to hunt for the pieces. Dunked in a cloud: not a bad start to the day. The sky is very clear and the ground is often cloud, soft duvet mounds of pearly blue that will hold you up but which, brilliantly, still see you disappearing into the blurred depths for a few early seconds before momentum carries you back to the surface. Connection is forgiving - even grind rails have a sort of mag-lev dreaminess to them, so you can hop on and off without much in the way of fiddliness. The earth curves away in strange, promising pathways. You ghost frictionlessly over the landscape here, a thing of will and direction only. It's a cosmic skating game with spectacular rinks and it absolutely does not want you to stop moving even for a second. This is Solar Ash, and Solar Ash is a skating game, really. Availability: Out December 2nd on PC (Epic Games Store), and PlayStation 4 and 5.It was beautiful and teasing and I wondered how to get there. The island was facing downwards, so where there should be stars, I saw patchy grass and the tops of noble pines. Late last night I stood in a floating church, looking up through the bones of the shattered ceiling towards the sky, where an island hung above me. They’ve really been pushing on that front and others have followed suit or had their own push for accessibility options.This glorious game about movement and adventure also feels like a rumination on something deeper and more personal. I love what has been happening in the industry over the last couple of years, especially with Naughty Dog. It’s just inherent that a 3D game is less accessible than a 2D game mechanically speaking. We’re trying to open it up because we know that it’s going to be a bigger challenge for others out of the gate without actually having enemy encounters or anything like that to add on top. That’s one of the bigger changes here out of the gate offering a variety of difficulty levels because of all those new aspects, because of the different focus here in this game from combat to more of the traversal and exploration. This game requires a bit more on the mechanical side of things to navigate just by virtue of the camera and then you toss in the speed, you toss in the big giant boss creatures, you toss in all these other elements and it can become a big ass challenge that even the easiest version of it can be difficult. I love that look but it’s used because it’s a little simpler and easier to deal with in general for smaller teams that don’t have the luxury of the tech artist or graphics engineer because those things are difficult jobs for very talented people and this is quite a step beyond flat-shading. And that means that it’s like turning elements off from the rendering pipeline typically to get the lower stylized look. You see the smaller indie games that are flat-shaded. It’s not the same as something that’s flat-shaded. All of the industry is really biased towards PBR and the tools that are created and the pipelines that are there and the way that everything intercepts and what the engines are built around, so you have to do a lot of heavy lifting to go against the grain for that and get this kind of stylized more cell-shaded cartoonish or hyper colorful flat look. It’s certainly challenging to have a non- PBR workflow. You know, a lot of very talented folks working on it to get the look that we got out of it. We’ve had a lot of really talented people on the team on the graphics and engineering end of things, tech-art and environment art, et cetera.
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